It was a very great pity indeed, she thought glumly, that she would be separated from this gorgeous man by one hundred kilometres of ice.
They dispersed to their posts at the end of the meal. Colin and Kate were dropped up onto the ice then the Westland took John and Asha Higgins and Professor Maille back to Niobe. Richard went off to do some late checking and phoning and Sally drifted into the officers’ lounge with Bob Stark and a big cup of coffee. She was due on watch duty soon and had nothing to do in the meantime. They chatted idly, like old friends. She told him about her childhood in Ulster and her education in Belfast. ‘You should talk to old Higgins,’ he informed her. ‘He’s got a lot of Irish in his background. Father’s family, mostly. He’s a Manxman, though.’ And he told her of his own Ivy League background, his youth and education in New England, his father the senator and his uncle the US Navy admiral. But he spoke of these things naturally and thoughtlessly with no desire to impress her with his family wealth or social standing.
At midnight they went up onto the bridge together and he sat in the watchkeeper’s chair on the left side of the bridge while she dismissed the third officer to bed and signed on as watchkeeper.
He crossed his legs and his trousers slid up to reveal a glimpse of calf. ‘Good God,’ she said, straightening. ‘Is that a bullet wound?’
‘Yup, sure is. Got it in an honest to God shoot-out, too.’
‘Gunfight at die OK Corral?’
‘Fighting terrorists on an oil platform called Fate. Though I was actually shot on the deck of Prometheus’
‘That’s where Captain Higgins got shot too, isn’t it?’
‘And Asha nursed him back to health. They’ve been playing doctors and nurses ever since.’
Sally shook her head. ‘Boy, do you all lead exciting lives.’
‘We all. You’re one of us now. Part of the team.’
‘In the Club at any rate.’
‘So your life should get a bit more exciting soon too.’
‘Och!’ she said, her Belfast background surfacing in the sound of disbelief.
Just then the warning light in the radio shack lit up.
‘Incoming,’ observed Bob cheerfully.
‘I’ll get it,’ said Sally and crossed to the little room. She picked up the microphone and flipped the channel open.
‘Titan, are you receiving me, over?’
‘This is Titan, receiving you strength ten, over.’
‘Titan, this is Ajax, over. Message for Captain Mariner.’
‘Hold on, Ajax, I’m buzzing him now. Captain, it’s Sally here. I have an incoming for you from Ajax. Yes, right…Hello, Ajax, the Captain’s coming up at once. May I have your current position and ETA at our position?’
‘Four hundred kilometres west of Julianehab. We will be with you by dawn, over.’
‘Thank you very much, Ajax, handing you over to Captain Mariner now…’
Richard went in as Sally came out. He put on the headphones, switched off the open channel and swung the door closed, but he was speaking at once so Sally and Bob heard his first words quite clearly.
‘Ah. Captain Borodin. Welcome to the Davis Strait…’
Sixteen hours later, everything was in place. Ajax had joined Achilles and their lines were secured to Tom Snell’s anchorage places. Titan and Niobe were also in place and secured to the ice. Richard was standing at the capstans on Titan’s poop watching narrow-eyed along the sag of that strange, black almost crystalline rope which stretched back behind them, seeming to grasp the ice with an unnerving, four-fingered hand. The afternoon was dull and overcast. There was a storm due to break out of Hudson Bay later tonight or tomorrow. It was time to be gone.
Richard raised his walkie-talkie to his lips. All of them had agreed on channel four as the general hailing frequency and all of the key players in this scene had their walkie-talkies close at hand, open on channel four. Up on the ice, the radio shack behind Colin Ross’s base was receiving and retransmitting channel four so that it could be heard by Bob Stark and Katya Borodin as clearly as by Sally Bell on Titan’s bridge and John Higgins on Niobe nearby.
Richard’s stomach was knotted with tension. He knew he was standing on the edge of the unknown. No one had ever tried to move anything this big before. No one in the history of the world had tried to take a piece of ice one hundred kilometres long and deliver it to a point eleven thousand kilometres away as the crow flies. He had thought about this moment, what he would say, how it would sound. He was not a self-publicist, but he knew that he had a reputation and that what he said now would add to it — or go a long way towards destroying it. He had planned a little speech. He had wondered about something as derivative as ‘one small step’, or as bland as ‘slow ahead all’, but now as he stood there on this grey, blustery afternoon looking up at the bow-shaped cliff of ice towering above him, the wind gusted five hundred metres up and blew a combination of ice dust and spray off Manhattan in two long, white horns. Because his blood was full of adrenaline and he would very much, just at that moment, have liked to be in another place or in another time, he was taken back to his childhood and the days — the only days in all his life — when he had wanted to be something other than a sailor. To the days when his first great hero on the television would turn at the end of Rawhide and say the same thing every week.
It fitted with how he felt, what they were doing and how the iceberg looked just at that moment with the white horns butting at the sky. For the first time in more than forty years he said the words Gil Favor used to say to Rowdy Yates, loud and clear, for better or worse, whether his listeners understood them or not. ‘Head them up,’ he said. ‘Move them out.’
He felt the whole of his great vessel begin to throb and he walked swiftly back to the after rail. He stood sideways on so he could look back towards the ice, forward towards the second officer’s team on the capstans, down towards the foaming water.
‘Slow ahead!’
The water was foaming up under the counter down there as though they were sitting atop an underwater volcano. The black rope had lost its sag and the thin talon quivered as it clawed at the ice. He could see the figures of Snell’s team moving about there apprehensively, checking the anchorage points with one eye on the rope in case it parted after all and cut back to chop them to pieces.
‘Slow ahead!’ he said again. The mountain of foam behind the ship seemed to grow and a low humming started. It was the tension in the rope and the sound dried his mouth out. He could hear his heart beating. This wasn’t going to work.